No more so than the fencing scene in Princess Bride was inspired by anime
("But I find that Thibault cancels out Capo Ferro, don't you?" "Unless the enemy has studied his Agrippa. Which I have.")
Some techniques DO have specific names (e.g. Dutch angles) so people assume the rest must as well.
You saying you dont sit there screaming different editing techniques as youre editing your videos? Thats dissapointing, i thought you were a pro. Im starting to think... I dont know Dan Olsen...
(Related: early in Return of the Living Dead, there's a quick cut of Tarman reacting that's taken from a shot later on in the movie. Is there a name for that?)
2 factors, one very recent and one that’s been building for a while.
Recent one is bots which are scraping videos for data to create videos, and want to know what prompt keywords to associate with the data they’re scraping.
Specifically: people who grew up in the Web 2.0 and later era quietly internalized this idea that they could only find content that was relevant to their interests if they knew the right search terms. Everything gets a hashtag, a topic name which lets you look it up if you want “more like this”
People don’t usually want to find a specific piece of media as much as they want to immerse themselves in a vibe, and the vocabulary we have for describing a vibe used to be very poor. Genres were okay but we started needing more and more specific micro genres to find “more like this”
And we’re going to spend YEARS deconstructing the effects of this keywording-of-everything. I theorize that it’s a strong contributor to identity politics and leftist infighting.
Example: The division and subdivision of sexual and gender identity into obscure microlabels is driven by this “keywording” concept applied to personal identity. If you’re struggling with personal identity and you see content that appeals to you, you check the hashtags if you’re looking for more.
You see memes and videos and posts that appeal to you and they share a hashtag, and you think “maybe that’s what I am” until your bio has like 20 of them, because you’re trying to signal to your people that you’re one of them in this decentralized environment
I think this comes more from the uptick in really specific youtube tutorial type content tbh. Which...honestly is tied into the tiktok amv ecosystem so like... I mean...
Or I should be more specific in that i mean the second unstated part of the "what style of editing is this?" question is "so i can look up how to do it/what plugins i need on youtube"
the show's real sin is that it's just not a very interesting exploration of how idol culture is bad. idk what they were thinking with the isekai angle either
You seem to be working under the assumption that OnK and Perfect Blue have the same artistic goals and creative intent in mind, in spite of the corruption of JP entertainment being a well-worn framework.
Season 2 has half-episode detours into side-characters' side characters while Ruby's entire S2 story line is functionally crammed into the last 4 episodes.
That's kind of an inevitable consequence of adapting a manga where the author has far more control on the exact sequencing of individual events VS an anime where everything has to be set in 20-minute episodes.
I'm glad they made the choice to make the opening a feature film because if they'd stretched it out over however many episodes it would've taken I probably would've peaced out by episode two.
A lot of people want it to be a thing that it's not interested in being, and are upset that it ends in the way it telegraphed from (whatever chapters of the manga are adapted into) episode 2 of the anime
A show that would be immeasurably improved if the supernatural bullshit and the murder mystery didn't exist and it was just a drama about various kids in the entertainment industry.
Parallel to laypeople jumping onto architecture subreddits with a picture of a random suburban tract home and breathlessly asking "what style is this!?" as though every ephemeral design trend must belong to a named Grand Movement they can set their tastes by.
Kiiiiind of? It's also people who are hoping for keywords so they can search for tutorials on how they can achieve that look, and also in some part people looking for AI prompt ideas(a lot of people think it's the AI thing exclusively, but I'm *sure* this practice predates public genAI)
In my mind it's related to the "what brushes did you use?" Question in digital art. Newbies who are sure they're just one tutorial or one tool away from being as good as their favourite artists, if only they can find the *right* resource
YouTube has loads of tutorials like "how to draw in impressionist style!" "How to shoot like[photographer]!" That often skip over the basics of the medium that would help the newbies develop their own eye for style. I guess it's kind of downstream of the "how to draw anime" books?
I'll be real I think they just wanna know the name of a particular technique so they can find more examples of it. Like, there are words for all sorts of categories of things. Different transitions have names (wipe, fade, jumpcut, etc.), different shots have names (wide, long, closeup, etc.)
Could this be downstream of TikTok et al taxonomizing everything as a “-core”? I feel like this is the expected result when everything in the arts is extracted from its context and given a label.
I remember making amateur short films with a lot of film majors in college and so many of them kept saying stuff like "but how can we make this shot more Kubrick" or "we need to find our Tarantino moment in the film"
I think that's actually fine and way more artistically valid than the stuff dan's pointing to here but I wouldn't be able to articulate why. something to do with inspiration vs copying maybe, even though that isn't always a clear line
this paradigm in context of anime came from Fist of Northstar where everything is called a 'Martial Art'. from punching people really hard, to throwing sticks of dynamite. it's all 'Martial Arts'.
shounen would canonize this by continuing to have arbitrary 'fighting styles'.
and obviously, anime coopted this sentiment from irl Martial Arts. where a lot of 'Fighting Styles' are pro-wrestling tier kayfabe.
now, this isnt why westerners would use 'style'.. but it's the same thought process. a naive viewpoint that everything must have a defined name for it.
No, they’re probably getting it from years of everything having a genre or category for ease of discovery. These peeps wanna find similar editing so they’re looking for some category so they can find other examples of editing in that category.
(I also could be wrong about the origins of tvtropes lol, but it does feel like a 2000s era joke about things that don't have names getting wiki entries)
Probably doesn't help that the way Mr. Beast's videos are edited is referred to as a style. That overly edited, tons of quick cuts, leaving no real room for anything to breathe. Granted it's only been called that due to how many on youtube started to mimic it.
I think it's paaaaaartially that, and partially a misunderstanding of what a "technique" or an "art style" is.
I also think tvtropes might actually be at some fault here, as some of these folks might have gotten a little too used to tropes having specific (made up) names.
It's the "Kids growing up seeing this wiki style site that is often referenced, thinking it's similar to how anime will call attacks, but not realizing that tvtropes is soooooooo old internet that it in itself is a joke about everything requiring a wiki so fuck it let's make up names for tropes"
Which woooouuuld explain why nowadays tvtropes just doesn't have the same snarky feel as it used to as now contributers have grown up with it, not realizing it was a 2000s era joke, so are doing it genuinely.
a lot of short-form editing/art/music educational content also sells itself as "how to do a hopecore edit" or "how to make breakcore music" or that kind of thing, so people might just want to know what to look up to find tutorials in their platform of choice
i also see this exact question (what style is this/what do you call this style) in home interior groups
it’s bc the youths have been raised on short-lived social media aesthetics and also don’t know how to study or find things or look at a large topic and pick what they like
My particular little niche I see this in is historical costuming. People asking what specific elements are called, or even whole garments - when often the answer is "that's a shift (17th century style) or "those are gloves (18th century style)"
More than anything I think it's just like a consequence of social media's whole schtick.
Specifically it's people who discover things by having an algorithm serve it to them asking what tags/keywords they should search to find more of a new thing they liked.
It's also kinda social media's need to categorize everything to the smallest detail so it can figure out what will be the most engaging thing to serve somebody.
The same people have been around this super turbo categorization so long it's sorta how they think.
Asking the name of editing tricks like ramping, tracking shot, jump cut, dolly zoom, (insert obscure filmmaking term) is perfectly reasonable. Can't look up tutorials for things you don't know the name of after all.
I wonder if it's so they can find tutorials, or perhaps examples done in the same style? Sometimes with music, for example, I really like a song or album and want to find other stuff like it, but don't have the words to search for more.
Don't think you're crazy. Feel like this might be a consequence of a generation of internet teaching us to think in keywords and tags because that's how search engines work and how we find things now. So everything needs to have a label we can assign.
It's not anime I don't think, it's the proliferation of pop theory being available. It's not like editing doesn't have names, like the Kuleshov Effect or a Dutch Angle, and taxonomic overindulgence comes for all nerds eventually.
I noticed this a little while ago for drawing and writing. Ended up being that it was a bunch of "AI artists/authors" looking for terms to put in their generative AI prompts for work they wanted to rip off.
I think is just how some people talk about things when they realize they don't have any of the vocabulary they need to describe something. They like a photo or video but can't describe it. They tried to google but couldn't get relevant results, so they turn to reddit. Completely unrelated to anime.
It's an AI thing. Eitehr kids trying to figure out what to prompt the parser with, or else bots trying to get people to "tag" things that aren't currently well-defined
i've noticed this happening a lot over in the drum world as well. people asking "what's the name of this beat" or "what [musical style] of snare drum is this"
my first guess is theyre getting it from spotify micro-niche music genres and "insert random word"-core combined with the usual ammount of the urge to categorize everything
the only reason i never ask is i just assume everyone else already knows and i dont wanna feel left out :v
Martial arts had a name for every move before anime existed, at least the martials arts I'm familiar with, so I think this is just a weird human nature thing.
People have been naming slight differences in things since forever, from chess moves, paint techniques, wrestling moves, music genre, story structure, cut of your clothes, etc
At a guess, They're looking for keywords so they can search for video tutorials online. Rather than take a structured class going over the fundamentals
I think it's a whole thing in the broader visual arts context, the over-compartimentalized discussion on style is prob something that comes from instagram honestly. It's where things go to become "something-core"
In the premiere and after effects subreddits in particular I think this also has to do with the plugin-ification of those software packages, where you'll get people asking "what plugin is this?" For a series of cross fades with nicely composed footage.
As our abilities to work faster and pack more effects into a single workday have increased, we've improved the plugin industry to make many operations one click by necessity, due to demand matching productivity.
But newcomers are also subject to those same requirements while lacking the important fundamentals. So what they're often looking for is a YouTube tutorial to show them how, or a plugin to do it for them, because they don't have the time for first principles.
With the dwindling number of junior positions available in every field, you have to lie in order to get a job now. The pressure to get up to speed is even greater. I see so many inexperienced editors trying to remake a 3 month animation in a week because their boss watched an insta ad they liked.
Those people don't have time to revisit first principles of animation, they need to justify their existence asap to an ever more impatient producer class being whipped by an ever more demanding c suite class.
I think this phenomena leads to the necessity of shorthand. There's less time for curiosity and teasing things apart. It needs a name and a YouTube video showing you how to do it, and it has to be handed in by EOD Friday.
Comments
("But I find that Thibault cancels out Capo Ferro, don't you?" "Unless the enemy has studied his Agrippa. Which I have.")
Some techniques DO have specific names (e.g. Dutch angles) so people assume the rest must as well.
2 factors, one very recent and one that’s been building for a while.
Recent one is bots which are scraping videos for data to create videos, and want to know what prompt keywords to associate with the data they’re scraping.
Longer one is an artifact of internet culture
Woke: ZA WARUDO
shounen would canonize this by continuing to have arbitrary 'fighting styles'.
now, this isnt why westerners would use 'style'.. but it's the same thought process. a naive viewpoint that everything must have a defined name for it.
"This one is Wolf Fang Fist, but it's clearly influenced by the more traditional Destructo Disc technique"
see if anyone catches on, or if any one catches on
The one con is we might accidentally end up with tvtropes 2.0 but for video editing...
(I also could be wrong about the origins of tvtropes lol, but it does feel like a 2000s era joke about things that don't have names getting wiki entries)
Although now that I think of it, there's probably a lot in common here with anime, "haha, you didn't anticipate my Accelerated Dragon!"
I don't think it's a bunch of wannabe editors trying to genuinely learn.
But idk for sure, obviously. Not in their heads.
The AI shit is the only big shift I've encountered personally.
Maybe there's some big shonen call-out name trend. Or maybe it just looks that way when requests pile up?
All I can do is relay what I've (not) seen and (not) heard.
And I have done "what's it called when..." searches a lot across the life of the internet.
Sorry if it's less useful than intended. :3
I also think tvtropes might actually be at some fault here, as some of these folks might have gotten a little too used to tropes having specific (made up) names.
That or I'm making up silly conspiracy theories.
i also see this exact question (what style is this/what do you call this style) in home interior groups
it’s bc the youths have been raised on short-lived social media aesthetics and also don’t know how to study or find things or look at a large topic and pick what they like
we grew up getting a broad knowledge base from overview media like books and courses. they don’t. they get short form videos and pinterest posts
More than anything I think it's just like a consequence of social media's whole schtick.
Specifically it's people who discover things by having an algorithm serve it to them asking what tags/keywords they should search to find more of a new thing they liked.
The same people have been around this super turbo categorization so long it's sorta how they think.
the only reason i never ask is i just assume everyone else already knows and i dont wanna feel left out :v
I mean you could blame art history for labeling movements